How Comrade Peter Boyle ‘defends the general line’ of the NE’s DSP-SA relations resolution
By Doug Lorimer, Sydney branch
In his contribution to the initial Sydney branch PCD on the NE’s draft resolution “The DSP and the Socialist Alliance”, held on September 24, Comrade Peter Boyle stated that he was defending the general line of the draft resolution. However, in both his report to the August 15 national executive meeting on a 3rd draft of the resolution (incorporating the main amendments proposed by Comrade John Percy and myself) and in his draft party-building report for the October NC plenum (presented to the September 26 NE meeting), Comrade Boyle has presented a position that contradicts the political line of the draft resolution adopted by the August 15 NE meeting.
The NE’s draft resolution states that “Our December 2003 resolution to integrate as much of the resources of the Democratic Socialist Party into the Socialist Alliance as possible … has failed because the conditions to build the Socialist Alliance into a new party did not exist”. It states that the “Socialist Alliance will have to go through a more extended period of united campaigning and left regroupment with broader left forces that are generated by a new upsurge of resistance to the capitalist neoliberal ‘reforms’ before it can harness the leadership resources and political confidence to take a significant step to creating a new socialist party.”. The resolution draws the conclusion from this assessment that “the DSP has not been able to and cannot afford to operate as an internal tendency in the Socialist Alliance” and proposes that “the DSP function as a public revolutionary socialist organisation, while continuing to be affiliated to the Socialist Alliance, to build it and to provide political leadership to it”, not as a new socialist party-in-formation but as “a campaigning alliance in the social movements (particularly the trade union movement) that seeks to build a new mass workers’ party.”
In the concluding paragraphs of his report to the August 15 NE meeting, however, Comrade Boyle argued that, “We did not begin the turn that gave us SA as a second party at the last DSP Congress. It began in 2002.” He then quoted the following from the September 2, 2002, NE report “that launched this turn”: “The current political situation is creating new openings to collect a bigger revolutionary vanguard in Australia today and our proposal is a response to these new conditions.” (This proposal was to convert the Democratic Socialist Party into an internal tendency of the Socialist Alliance so as to progress the SA into as a multi-tendency socialist party). Comrade Boyle then added the comment, “That opening is not closed.”
Thus, in motivating the adoption of a draft resolution that states that the objective political conditions did not exist in December 2003 to implement the party-building orientation that was first proposed in September 2002 and which we have attempted to implement since December 2003, and that will not come into existence without a sustained upsurge in working-class resistance to the capitalist neoliberal “reforms”, Comrade Boyle affirms that the political conditions to implement this orientation have “not closed”, i.e., continue to exist. This is how Comrade Boyle “defends the general line” of the NE’s draft resolution – by affirming a political position that is completely contrary to that put forward in the draft resolution!
Earlier in his report, Comrade Boyle took issue with the argument that we cannot build two parties for an extended period made in the notes that Comrade Percy circulated a few days prior to the August 15 NE meeting: “In his Notes, John argues that the evidence is clear that we cannot build two parties for an extended period. I think we can and need to build two ‘parties’ at this time: The DSP and the Socialist Alliance. But they are two different kinds of ‘parties’. The DSP is a revolutionary party. The Socialist Alliance is a broad left party project around a more limited ‘class struggle’ program that can really only move forward with revolutionary leadership.” The end result of this piece of literary gymnastics is that Comrade Boyle appeared to agree with Comrade Percy that we can’t build two actually existing parties – that we must build an actually existing revolutionary party (the DSP) and a broad left party project (the Socialist Alliance). However, in the paragraph immediately preceding these four sentences, Comrade Boyle argued against declaring that the DSP is “the party we are building” and toward the end of his report he declared that the “turn” toward converting the DSP into an internal tendency of the SA has given us “SA as a second party”.
The NE’s draft resolution states that the “conditions to build the Socialist Alliance into a new party did not exist” over the last two years. But in his August 15 NE report, Comrade Boyle stated that the “turn” in our party-building orientation first proposed in September 2002, and which we have attempted to implement over the last two years, has given us the SA “as a second party”.
At the end of his draft party-building report prepared for the October NC plenum, Comrade Boyle repeats almost word for word the argumentation about the political conditions that we mistakenly assumed to exist for transforming the SA into a party having “not closed” – though this time he puts quotations marks around the words “second party” when referring to the “turn that gave us SA as a second party”.
Nowhere in the NE’s draft resolution does it characterise the SA as a second party (with or without quotation marks). The draft resolution adopted by the NE on August 15 argues that the “resolution ‘The Democratic Socialist Perspective and the Socialist Alliance’ [adopted at the last DSP congress] set the DSP on a course of building the Socialist Alliance, progressing its transformation into a united, multi-tendency socialist party and integrating as much of the resources of the Democratic Socialist Party into the Socialist Alliance as possible”, but that, “despite our best efforts, we have not been able to build the Socialist Alliance into an effective party” because ““the conditions to build the Socialist Alliance into a new party did not exist” when we set out on this course, still do not exist and will not come into existence without the attraction to the SA of “broader left forces that are generated by a new upsurge of resistance to the capitalist neoliberal ‘reforms’.”
Just over a week after voting for the amended draft resolution and Comrade Boyle’s report to the August 15 NE meeting, Comrade Margarita Windisch submitted a PCD article (cosigned by NC member Karl Miller) in which she argued that “at the heart of the [NE’s draft resolution] is the recognition that the SA is a party formation and that the DSP provides revolutionary, socialist and political leadership to it.” I pointed out in a PCD article replying to her and Comrade Miller (in The Activist Vol. 15, No. 5) that nowhere in the NE’s draft resolution does it state that the SA is a “party formation”, an actually formed party, adding that “At the actual ‘heart’ of the draft resolution is a very different assessment – that ‘Our December 2003 resolution to integrate as much of the resources of the Democratic Socialist Party into the Socialist Alliance as possible … has failed because the conditions to build the Socialist Alliance into a new party did not exist.”
Where then did comrades Windisch and Miller get the mistaken idea that at the “heart of the [NE’s draft] resolution is the recognition that SA is a party formation”, an actually formed new left party? In the absence of any other explanation from these comrades, I can only presume they got it from Comrade Boyle’s argument that (as he put it in his August 15 NE report) “we can and need to build ‘two parties’ at this time: The DSP and the Socialist Alliance” and his claim that the “new conditions” in the class struggle that we assumed existed at the time we began the “turn that gave us SA as a second party” are “not closed”.
In his draft party-building report for the October NC plenum, Comrade Boyle not only affirms that the “opening we were responding to back in 2002”, i.e., when we first proposed to convert the DSP into an internal tendency of the SA so as to progress its transformation into a united, multi-tendency socialist party, “has not closed”, but “In some ways it is still opening up as Labor’s political crisis deepens and the Greens are tested as they win control of a few local councils”. These developments undoubtedly give us more openings to argue – to carry out propaganda work – for an alternative political vehicle for the working class, a mass workers’ party, but they do not fulfil the political conditions set out in the NE’s draft resolution to continue with our attempt to transform the SA into a new socialist party.
The NE’s draft resolution argues that this will require the harnessing by the SA of “broader left forces that are generated by a new upsurge of resistance to the capitalist neoliberal ‘reforms’” Does Comrade Boyle no longer think that this assessment is part of the “general line” of the NE’s draft resolution that should be defended – that the deepening political crisis for the ALP (most recently accelerated by Mark Latham’s revelations) and the testing out of the Greens “as they win control of a few local councils” will generate the “broader left forces” that the SA needs to harness in order “to take a significant step to creating a new socialist party”? If he agrees with the assessment made in the NE’s draft resolution that the broader left forces that are needed to advance the Socialist Alliance from a new left party project (an alliance that aims to form a new party) to an actual new party will only be “generated by a new upsurge of resistance to the capitalist neoliberal ‘reforms”‘ (and not simply by a further exposure of the ALP’s political bankruptcy), what purpose is served by asserting that the “opening” that we mistakenly thought existed to transform the SA into a new party, or our “second party”, not only continues to exist but is “still opening up”?
Comrade Boyle claims that he is “defending the general line” of the NE’s draft resolution on “The DSP and the Socialist Alliance”. However, what he has submitted so far to the written PCD (his August 15 NE report and the draft NC report he presented to the September 26 NE meeting) demonstrates that he is attempting to straddle two positions – the actual political line of the NE’s draft resolution and the position of those comrades who are committing what Lenin pointed out in “Left-Wing” Communism is a “most dangerous mistake for revolutionaries to make”. i.e., mistaking their hopes, their political “desire .. for objective reality” (Resistance Books, p. 60). This mistake manifests itself today in our party among comrades who have deluded themselves that the SA is an already existing new party, our “second party”, or can be transformed into a new party simply with a bit more effort on our part, i.e., who want to continue on the mistaken and failed course we adopted at our last party congress.